Who I Am by Sarah Simpson | Blog Tour Guest Post | (@sarahrsimpson @Aria_Fiction) #WhoIAm #psychologicalthriller

Published by Aria

Available in ebook and paperback (6 November 2018)

492 pages

|   About the Book  |

I know everything about you

And you know everything about me… except

WHO I AM.

Andi met Camilla at university. Instantly best friends, they shared everything together. Until their long-planned graduation celebration ends in tragedy…

Years later, Andi is living a seemingly perfect life on the rugged Cornish Coast with her loving husband, happy children and dream home. Yet Andi is haunted by a secret she thought only she knew. Someone out there is bringing Andi’s deepest fears to life. And she knows there’s no escaping the past that has come back to haunt her…

You trusted me with your secrets, you told me everything, you thought I was your best friend… but you have no idea WHO I AM.

Gripping, unputdownable and packed with twists and turns from the first page to the very last, this stunning psychological thriller will make you question whether we can ever really trust the ones we love.

Forming My Main Protagonists

by Sarah Simpson

‘Perception – or life as we know it. Perception meanders down from upstairs, mingling with and influencing billions of neurochemical reactions as it descends. It changes with context; it changes with experience; it changes minds. The perceptual steps are not unyielding. They stretch and bend, as malleable as plastic. The world you perceive isn’t really the world itself, it is, simply, your story of the world. At the moment. What you see in this story or any other story; is in part choice and in part unconscious; but always utterly subjective’.

This is something I scribbled down before I began my writing journey and it still remains at the heartbeat of my writing and with no exception my latest novel – Who I Am. In particular, there is no real truth in any story that twists and turns its way through the pages, ending each chapter with a cliff-hanger, there is only ever the reader’s perception. And this is the point of Who I Am.

My two main female protagonists – Andi and Camilla, come from such diverse walks of life and are consequently different in every conceivable way. However, their emotional needs remain the same, their emotional conflicts are very similar but because of their backgrounds, how they go about attempting to fill the voids is so blatantly disparate. Camilla, in particular is such a complex character and as a writer at times, she infuriated me, she was also deliciously naughty, incredibly sharp and has the ability to pull on the heart strings. Because we have an understanding of her sometime disingenuous, sometimes sharp and often defensive nature, she’s also loveable. Like Eve, from my first novel –Her Greatest Mistake, Camilla tells a most tragic and heart-wrenching story.

Andi, on the other hand, is so bound by her life, so suffocated by the unspoken expectations she also makes decisions that lead her down pathways to ensure she spends the best chunk of her life regretting and clamouring away. I’m expecting that the reader’s empathy for her will be less tolerant because of her exorbitant background. And this was the point of writing these two extreme characters, we as readers have more or less empathy depending on our perception, depending on our personal experiences. But these two characters share the same plight – no matter what. Only the wrapping is altered.

There are several other characters in Who I Am, this is in fact a tangled web of deceit, jealousy, betrayal and many other taut emotions. However, I chose to tell the story mostly through the eyes of Andi and Camilla in first person. This allows me to show the depth and range of felt emotions more deeply, allowing the reader more of a fly on the wall experience. Who I Am, highlights how we can all on the surface, cope, survive and even thrive but nobody ever really knows what is bubbling away beneath this shell. Andi and Camilla share a tragic life event and the consequences of this, defines their lives forever, no matter what their background suggests.

My thanks to Vicky of Aria for the blog tour invitation and to Sarah for providing the guest post

|   About the Author  |

Sarah Simpson has a first-class honours degree in Psychology and has experienced working at a Brain Rehabilitation Hospital. She has spent time as a family consultant for Warwickshire and Oxfordshire solicitors and gained knowledge of the Family Court System. She now lives in Cornwall with her husband, three children and animals.

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